| In one day I managed to do more than I have done all summer: |
[Jul. 19th, 2009|02:00 am] |
And I'm exhausted...
- Drove to Cliff Side in SB
- Went down the cliff to the beach
- Played
- Went back up the cliff and walked in the park
- drove back into Arroyo Burro
- drove up to the mountains
- went on the SB Botanical Hike thingie
- Went down into the Mission Damn
- Finished the hike thingie
- Went to eat at Macaroni Grill
- Went to the Santa Paula Citrus Festival
- Walked through town
- Went grocery shopping
At some given point I must've gotten heat exhaustion or something because I felt like my whole body was hot and wanted to sleep badly. I drank h20 and relaxed, fell asleep, woke up feeling really hot, took a cool shower. Still downing the water. I changed at least one shade today from being in the sun.
Oh, by the way, doing all this in flip flops sucks - my feet hurt! Feels like my heel is bruised! I wouldn't take today back though. It was excellent and official vacation is not this week, but the week after. Super Excited!...I'll wear athletic shoes next time....
pics on facebook
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| review me if you please |
[Jul. 19th, 2009|03:00 am] |
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My entries I have made visible are more in a narrative format and less experimental. To put some of the writing in context I am a 24 year old female college student. A lot of my writing is confessional... I do not have the required 24 visible, but I tried to make public what I thought was worth reading. |
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| The cap of maintenance |
[Jul. 18th, 2009|02:58 pm] |
 Does a good farmer neglect a crop he has planted?
Does a good teacher overlook even the most humble student?
Does a good father allow a single child to starve?
Does a good programmer refuse to maintain his code?
— The Tao of Programming, 5.4 I like to make things. I like it a lot. It's one of my favourite things in the world. I also like to maintain things: not quite as much, but still a lot. It's fun as well as being a responsible thing to do.
The problem is this: the one leads inexorably to the other. If you spend thirty hours on a project, and you do it well enough that the project succeeds, you will spend three hundred hours maintaining it. Now, you only have so much time. If you spend a quarter of your time making things and the rest maintaining them, eventually you will have to stop making things in order to have enough time to maintain the things you have already made. You will have to take off the wizard's hat and spend the rest of your life wearing only the cap of maintenance. And that's a shame, because while maintaining things is fun, creating new things is more fun, and more like play; it would be a shame for it to vanish completely from your life. Note that I haven't said I'm talking about software here. I am, partly, but it applies to other endeavours as well: I'm also thinking of fiction and poetry.
This whole line of thinking started the other day because the users of four of my old projects (very reasonably) started asking for certain fixes, at the same time as I had some ideas for new projects: I always have ideas for new projects, probably more ideas than I have years left in my life. I began to realise that not only did I not have time to work on any new projects in themselves, I wouldn't have time to maintain them if I did.
This is also part of why I'm so excited both about gnome-shell and about the ideas which came up for Metacity at Gran Canaria; I've been only fixing bugs in Metacity, rather than adding new features, for over a year now. And perhaps that's necessary; I like the idea of projects asymptotically approaching perfection. But it doesn't solve the problem of decreasing creation opportunity over time.
So what are the solutions? There aren't any good ones.
- Refuse to maintain old projects. This is silly and irresponsible.
- Obsolete the project eventually. This is sometimes necessary, but it's irresponsible to do it because you don't have enough time to write fun code, rather than for technical reasons.
- Spend your whole time working on new projects that nobody will use, either because you don't distribute them or because they are of interest only to a deliberately tiny group of people. I think this was my unconscious strategy in software for years before I got into GNOME and discovered that writing things which were useful to people was actually far more fun. It's still my strategy for poetry and fiction: I write things and perhaps put them up on my blog and then never even try to do anything with them to share them with the world.
- Pay someone to look after it. This rather requires that your idea makes money and that you're willing to found a company to run it. However, you need business and leadership skills, which isn't true of me, and the thing you're making needs to be capable of making money, which isn't true of anything I've ever invented for myself.
- Get someone else to maintain what you make. The first piece of free software I wrote which was actually useful to people was Gnusto, and that was a maintenance nightmare because it used lots of rarely-touched parts of the Mozilla API which kept changing at no notice. Fortunately someone else picked it up and turned it into Parchment, making it something more wonderful than it had ever been. I suppose there must be people out there who enjoy doing maintenance more than making things, but perhaps not: finding people who are willing to take on your stuff is not really a trivial task. Of course, someone else will have to take over maintenance of your projects one day anyway, unless you happen to be immortal.
Is there a sustainable way to balance the desire to make new things with the ongoing responsibility to maintain them?
Photo © Jeff/Godfrey, cc-by-nc. |
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| Strong geography |
[Jul. 17th, 2009|01:31 pm] |
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Feministe has put up a Google map called "Strong Geography" where they are inviting people to add little stories of where and how they felt most strong. It's fascinating to read. |
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| If I was a Wikipedia vandal |
[Jul. 17th, 2009|12:05 pm] |
Most of what I do on Wikipedia is reverting vandalism, so I don't want to introduce any more of it. But sometimes I daydream:
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| A meta-post about blogging |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|05:39 pm] |
Part one: There are several interesting discussions currently going on on the Metacity blog, including the development of optional and experimental subsystems for CSS theming and window matching, and whether applications should be able to extend the window menu (so if you have Istanbul installed, you could add Screencast this window to all windows.) Hop over and add your two penn'orth.
Part two: I don't know any good content management systems. "Good" here means:- easy for the end user to use (which is not usually me)
- without continual security holes
- not requiring MySQL
- if possible, not requiring PHP; Perl or Python would be lovely.
Moveable Type goes some way towards being "good", but my complete blog is so large that it takes three quarters of an hour to publish it in static mode, and the dynamic mode appears to require weird and clunky PHPisms. I have worked around this to some extent by using MT's rather nice dashboard, but turning off dynamic publishing, and writing a simple but fairly powerful mod_perl system called Plough which produces dynamic content by reading out of the database of a MT installation and running the results through Template Toolkit. Several of the sites I look after now use this system. I rather like it, but it's not really ideal: MT requires me to keep the static files around anyway, and they waste space. Maybe there are better answers out there.
Part three: This blog's syndication is in a bit of a mess. It currently exists in four places:- LiveJournal, here, where it started. Archives are here going back to 2001.
- Dreamwidth, here-- but not everything has been imported from LJ.
- GNOME Blogs, here-- generally the same content as LJ, but not entirely. This is what is syndicated to Planet GNOME.
- marnanel.org, here-- again, not exactly the same content, but all public entries from LJ have been imported (although the comments haven't). This is what is syndicated to Planet Collabora. It's powered by Plough, of course.
I update the blog by writing it on Dreamwidth, letting Dreamwidth syndicate the content to LJ, and then copying it manually to GNOME Blogs and marnanel.org. I'm okay with this as syndication, but I think it would be good if I had fewer things to update. I'd quite like everything to end up on marnanel.org, for the increased control over styling and the googlejuice; I might perhaps write a script which updates marnanel.org and GNOME Blogs according to what's new in Dreamwidth's RSS.
Part four: I am still planning to write up GCDS, but this is not that post.
Part five: It has been mentioned that I don't blog about GNOME much any more, and that this is possibly not ideal for Planet GNOME. This happens because almost all my GNOME hacking involves Metacity, and of course that goes on the Metacity blog; I only mention here what I've already written there. If you have suggestions to fix this, please let me know! (Before you ask, the Metacity blog can't go on Planet GNOME; it's not allowed.)
In news unrelated to blogging, my temperature has reached 99.6°F (38°C) and I feel rather awful. I hope I feel better tomorrow. |
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| I'm not a doctor. I don't even play one on TV. |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|07:52 am] |
I was printing a two-page document and decided to save a sheet of paper by printing it on both sides. Except it took me five pieces of paper because I kept feeding the sheet back into the printer wrong. The truly amusing part is that there are only four different orientations I could possibly feed paper, and yet I still managed to use five pieces of paper. I swear it changed the rules on me halfway through.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to meet someone who has part of a complete collection that merges perfectly with my own with no overlap. Like the other end of my Sandman volumes or They Might Be Giants CDs. I don't know if this means the other person would be my opposite or just some dissimilar aspect of me, or something else entirely. It's kind of like breaking two different cups and making one cup out of the pieces. I don't know if that works with people, though.
( Food Related Mishap #2 )
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| Quiet |
[Jul. 13th, 2009|12:58 pm] |
I miss my family (mom, dad, brother). I saw pics of Clearwater, FL - it's gorgeous! My brother has been updating FB so I can see where they are plus I've been stalking him on Latitude. Which, by the way, is awesome. Shows me where he is and you can switch map mode to satellite imaging.
Got to see Gangrel yesterday - you'll be interested to know he wrestles in New Rock boots. Also, he has a cute little pink gear bag *snicker* And for those who don't know who he is, former WWE Super Star Gangrel used to be in the faction The Brood with Edge & Christian:
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| Review Me? |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|05:48 pm] |
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I was just a smidge bit curious. It's too bad I don't feel comfy making public my friends only stuff. Feel free to skip over the youtube entries and entries that don't have much to do with anything. Perhaps that's more than the few I'm thinking of in my head. Happy Saturday. |
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| Worst Quitter EVER |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|08:53 pm] |
Apparently ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) the_silent_army has gone to get a life.
Sorry, didn't think it was mean enough for a deletion. Otherwise, be sure to check out his/her journal for several captivating text walls about anime video games that AREN'T VIDEO GAMES ABOUT ANIME BECAUSE THEY ARE SO TRANSCENDENT AS TO HAVE ACTUALLY BECOME ANIME OMG
Also, what does the_silent_army mean, "look harder"? Like a Magic Eye poster? Magic Text Wall? |
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| is it really six years? |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|02:19 pm] |
Six years ago today, Fin and I stood together and pledged our futures to one another. I'm still so glad we did so. I love you, sweetheart. Here's to many more. ♥ |
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| Davyd Madeley: Documentation BoF |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|05:54 am] |
How we're generating documentation in telepathy-doc.
There are three kinds of docs: facing developer (like a tutorial... what tool?), facing user ("how do I format my USB key"... Mallard), and the stuff you format from the API (gtk-doc).
Developer docs
HIG, GTK Drawing Manual, ... etc
Example code, descriptive prose, i18n, multi-programming-language examples (how??), link to the API references
telepathy-doc
DocBook, gnome-doc-tools, svg figures, and a ton of Python to play with the xml. DocBook purists don't like this (would rather do it in DocBook).
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| email just received. thank you, whoever it was :) |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|07:18 am] |
from Positive Spam
date 9 July 2009 07:16
subject You look lovely today!
I just wanted to tell you that you're looking absolutely GORGEOUS today.
Take care, gorgeous.
P.S. Did I mention you have beautiful eyes?
xxx |
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| All I wanted was a video game... |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|04:32 pm] |
This could also be titled: I was just confronted by a crazy person.
So I went to Gamestop looking for Ghostbusters. I browsed the ps3 section then on to the PS2 section. Now, initially when I walked in some guy walked in not long after me and he was doing an exchange or buy back. I heard this guy say all he had was 10 min so hurry. I continued to look through the games and I heard Travis (clerk) ask for his ID. The guy said he had to go but he could be back in 5 if they hold the transaction for him. Travis said ok. I was looking through the ps2's and I hear some aggressive language behind me. I thought someone was angry at a transaction then I hear them say, "Huh? Why wont you just back off?" I turned and this guy was walking towards me from the door. I look at him them realize he's talking to me. I say "excuse me?" and he mocks me saying "excuse me" back - then he starts ripping into me wanting to know what my problem is. All I'm thinking is, "Who the fuck is this guy?" and he starts telling me how clever I think I am, how intelligent I must think I am standing there with my purse. I ask him if he's done and he repeats "are you done?" then he goes into a thing where he says "nice iron cross. What is that? You've got a tattoo, just like everyone else?" (he had a big tattoo on his arm, nautical stars and something else, colored). The store clerks says something to defend me and the guy yells that all he's talking about is syllables and semantics (or something) meanwhile I've put my hand in my purse and located my knife so I'm just holding it inside my purse. He continues to go off on me, about how I'm wearing "my hood on my shoulder" and that I'm wearing black and blue and "what do you, work at jack n the box?"
Now, at first the Gina in me wanted to yell back at this guy and mock him about his "ripped jeans and beanie with sun glasses and loose T in summer wear" also - that his shirt was red (McDonalds), that's when I figured it was a mistaken idenetity or just a douche bag...but I just stood there asking if he was done yet when I began to realize there's something wrong with him... The guy said he'd be back but not if they were calling the cops (and they were). So the guy took his game, stormed out, and the last thing he said was "And you wonder why the sky is brown!"
I'm going for paranoid schizophrenic due to the fact that "I was following him" and apparently I wont leave him alone. The only thing that really bothered me is the amount of lashing out he did and the aggression he had was ripe for a physical confrontation - or him returning with a gun. Yes, he was that out there. Either he hadn't taken his meds (or stopped) or he hasn't been treated yet. Which is bad, and he needs treatment. Weird thing I noticed, whatever I said he said back and didn't answer,could've just been mocking though. The store called the 911 emergency line and the cops showed up quickly. Apparently they had a run in with him on their way in.
What a weird day I've had.
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| Since this is going round again |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|01:33 pm] |
People don't usually answer this any more when I post it, but it's going round again. Go on, knock yourselves out.
Ask me a question....
AND
...tell me a secret.
All comments are screened and I will answer all questions in another post, but not state who asked the question. |
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| Data transparency, manipulation of ambiguity, and competitive efficiency. |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|08:21 am] |
After being shown a frightening educational film in elementary school, I became terrified of the idea of 'strangers'. The video portrayed them as regular looking people who could apparently materialize out of thin air to ask you innocuous questions and disarm your childish defenses. I was convinced they were lurking around the neighborhood, waiting to emerge from behind trees and mail boxes. At one point I came up with the idea to carry around a screwdriver, the plan being that if I was ever confronted by a stranger, I could pull out my weapon, put on a scary smile and say "Hey, I'm a stranger too."
In preparation of my impending move out, I have bought a refrigerator. Since I am running out of room in my....room, I am using it as a temporary second closet. Currently, it contains the 21-volume Enchanted World book series, various board games, shoeboxes full of comics, shoes that used to be in those shoeboxes, and an oscillating fan. In fact, the only food I keep in there are some KrustyO's and a can of Buzz Cola. To be honest though, the real reason I bought the refrigerator is so I finally have a place to put all my refrigerator magnets.
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exhausted
hot
stunned
time killing